Corpo e sexualidade em contos de Lyudmila Petrushevskaya e Marina Paley: um olhar a partir da crítica literária feminista russa

Abstract

This work aims to carry out a study of the perception of the female body in the Soviet and post-Soviet period in Russia, based on the reading of short stories by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya and Marina Paley. In the first chapter we will research early feminist struggles and look into how the general conditions of women were approached and resolved in the Soviet regime, observing mainly the relationship with the female body and sexuality and how this dialogues with the communist regime where perception of it changed according to political, economic and demographic changes, that is, according to the needs of the always patriarchal state at its core despite the propaganda of equality between the genres. As a result, we will find out that women have always been left out of control and power over their bodies, sexuality and desires. In the second chapter we will make an overview of the thoughts and works of Russian feminist theories. We will demonstrate how feminism is perceived in Russian academia and, more specifically, the reception of feminist theories and Western feminist literary criticism by Russian feminist critics and theorists. The research will continue analyzing feminist literary theory with the focus on the female body. The methodology used will be analytical and comparative and the reflections on the theme will be a starting point for the analysis of short stories by two Russian writers, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Marina Paley and their short stories “Unripe gooseberries” and “The ward of the Doomed” respectively.